When Republicans controlled Congress in the 1990s, liberals fought hard to block a series of constitutional amendments demanded by conservatives, including provisions allowing official school prayer and prohibiting flag burning that would have effectively repealed core First Amendment freedoms. These days, with Democrats at least nominally in control, some prominent liberals are on the other side, fighting to repeal the First Amendment--in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Advocacy groups (like MoveOn and People for the American Way) and prominent Democrats (including Senators John Kerry and Chris Dodd) have announced their support for a constitutional amendment depriving corporations of political speech rights.

Dodd and Kerry have strong civil liberties records, and no one can accuse them of not understanding or respecting First Amendment freedoms, in general. But a lot of liberal Democrats and progressives have reacted to Citizens United with predictable partisan fury and fear, considering the political benefits it's expected to confer upon Republicans. It seems safe to say they will not succeed in passing a constitutional amendment, which requires a 2/3 vote in the House and Senate and will not garner unanimous Democratic support, much less the support of Republicans. (It's worth noting, and cheering, campaign finance reform champion Russ Feingold's opposition to a constitutional amendment.)

Legislative proposals limiting or clarifying corporate speech rights will and should be taken seriously (even though the prospects of passing any major legislation about anything seem slim). Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio has introduced a bill that would require shareholder approval of corporate political expenditures, disclosure of sponsorship, and a ban on electioneering by foreign corporations. Bills barring federal contractors from electioneering also seem likely. The Court ruled out none of these provisions in Citizens United, and reasonable civil libertarians will differ over the reasonableness of the burdens they impose on corporate speech. But a reasoned debate about appropriate, constitutional regulations of corporate electioneering requires correcting misconceptions about what the Citizens United ruling entailed; it also requires acknowledging the relationship between money and speech.

The Citizens United ruling did not (contrary to popular belief) overturn a century old ban on direct corporate contributions to political candidates. It overturned a ban on corporate or union speech that criticized candidates within a 60-day period before a general election and a 30 day period before a primary. The ban applied not just to big, bad corporations but to not for profit groups, like Citizens United, which had produced a movie highly critical of Hillary Clinton. (Former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser explains it all for you here at the Huffington Post.) In other words, the Court held that Congress could not criminalize criticism of congressional candidates in the month or two before elections, when voters are beginning to pay attention to campaigns.

It's easy to understand why opponents of campaign finance restrictions have long derided them as incumbent protection measures. What's hard is rationalizing support for such reform: as Floyd Abrams said, in a Wall Street Journalinterview: "You cannot be serious! We're talking about the First Amendment here, and we're being told that an extremely vituperative expression of disdain for a candidate for president is criminal in America?"

How do supporters of reform respond, "Money isn't speech," they usually declare, as if saying it could make it so. "Money is not speech," Chris Dodd said, announcing his intention to introduce a constitutional amendment nullifying Citizens United. But, as a practical matter, money is speech: that's why NPR periodically begs us for it; that's why newspapers are endangered by the decline of print advertising and why someone who owns a TV network is more influential than a street corner pamphleteer. As I've said before, if Congress passed a law limiting the amount of money we could spend annually on books or newspapers, we would probably not say, "Never mind. Money isn't speech." It's a fact of life, however lamentable, that money enables the exercise of constitutional rights, as liberal proponents of campaign finance restrictions implicitly acknowledge when they support medicaid funding for abortions. Few reproductive choice advocates would insist that money isn't choice.

But right and left, populist anger at corporate electioneering will not be easily assuaged; progressive support for outlawing corporate speech poses particular problems for free speech advocates at the increasingly liberal and decreasingly libertarian ACLU, which has long opposed bans on electioneering, as well as direct campaign contributions. ("Limitation on contributions or expenditures made by individuals or organizations for the purpose of advocating causes or candidates in the public forum impinge directly on freedom of speech and association," current ACLU policy states.) But, as the New York Sunreported last month, only a few days after the Court ruled in Citizens United, the ACLU national board met to debate its opposition to campaign finance restrictions.

Reversing the organization's position on campaign financing immediately after it was vindicated by the Supreme Court could surely be a public relations disaster. "There will be some people who think you're a little fickle for changing your policy three days after one of the greatest victories in this organization," Floyd Abrams pointed out; and the board put off a decision on the policy. In the meantime, however, the ACLU is apparently laying low, keeping its opposition to campaign finance restrictions officially in place, and at the same time, keeping quiet about it: Searching the website for "Citizens United v. FEC," I found two brief references to the case, from July and September 2009, respectively, pre-dating the Court's landmark decision.

But if many liberals and their organizations are selective in defending free speech, so is the Supreme Court, and so are many conservative Republicans who delighted in the Citizens United decision. (Commenting on the decision, my friend Harvey Silverglate suggests that the First Amendment is simply "a hook on which the Supreme Court's conservatives could hang their political hat.") Conservative justices who have so staunchly defended corporate speech rights have also staunchly opposed speech rights for students and supported thought crimes involving child pornography -- thought crimes fashioned by members of Congress whose solicitude for corporate speech is often matched by their disregard for the core political speech rights of individuals. You won't find many conservative Republicans who oppose restrictions on corporate electioneering and also oppose criminalizing flag burning. With friends like these, the First Amendment will never want for enemies.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.